


Not ALL Evil

by StevetheIcecube



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Gen, Good Harry, Hogwarts First Year, Hufflepuff Ron Weasley, I don't think I need to tag that Hermione will be smart, Powerful Harry, Powerful Hermione, Ravenclaw Hermione Granger, Slytherin Harry, Smart Harry, There will be twins later on, idk when
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-05-15
Updated: 2016-05-15
Packaged: 2018-06-08 15:44:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,289
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6861193
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StevetheIcecube/pseuds/StevetheIcecube
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Harry gets sorted into the 'wrong' house, he doesn't despair. He doesn't make any fast friends in his house either, but he becomes determined to change the minds of everyone who assumes that Slytherin means dark wizard.</p><p>Eventually he makes friends with the Ravenclaw Hermione, and concentrates on becoming the best wizard he can be.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Not ALL Evil

**Author's Note:**

  * For [TheDoctorIsIcecube](https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheDoctorIsIcecube/gifts).



Harry sat down on the stool and the brim of the hat fell over his eye line. He wondered where he'd go. So far it didn't really matter to him. Ron had spoken to him briefly and had seemed pretty keen on Gryffindor. But Ron hadn't been sorted yet, and he didn't know if he wanted to be with Ron anyway. He was very nice but he was sort of…Harry didn't want to be mean, but he didn't feel like Ron was very smart.

'You have quite a mind here, boy,' he jumped. There was a voice inside his head! Wasn't that a bad thing? 'No, no, calm down child. I'm the Sorting Hat, you see? I hope you were listening to my song. It takes rather a while to think of a new one all the time.' Harry felt he could do nothing but mentally nod. There didn't seem to be much point in arguing with this hat. 'That's definitely a Hufflepuff sort of attitude, but Hufflepuff is not for you at all, you're far too reliant on your own independence for them.' The words were sort of stretching together the longer he spent sat there listening. He didn't feel comfortable here. The hat couldn't decide where to put him and he honestly wanted to get away from here right now. He was taking up time and space that he didn't need to. Everyone was looking at him, probably thinking about how he looked stupid. How he was taking up time when no one really wanted him in their house. They wanted other people, not undersized stupid Harry.

'Could you sort me quickly please,' he thought in the general direction of where he thought the hat was in his mind.

'No, Mr Potter, this is very important. Where you are placed now will effect the rest of your life. I must say, I was told that Gryffindor was the right place for you, but I'm not so certain now I've met you.' Just put me there, he thought desperately. Put me anywhere they'll take me. 'But I must think about what is best for you, Mr Potter. Hufflepuff is out, they are just a little too lax to help you as you deserve, though you could do with their natures. Ravenclaw is too high pressure, you're very intelligent but they're hugely social up there, and you're not exactly a socialite. Gryffindor or Slytherin then…both will help you. From what I can see in your mind, Slytherin will dislike you. To them, you put their parents in prison, despite their own blame. But in Gryffindor your non academic expectations will be so high. But they will adore you. They'll listen to every word you say. Well. I suppose it shall be SLYTHERIN!' The last was called out to the entire hall, which was no longer filled with quiet murmur as they watched him get sorted. Someone almost right in front of him cursed, and he flinched. He gently got down off of the stool and looked, trying to readjust himself. From this angle, the people from Slytherin went over there…he gently put the hat back down. It was silent and no longer animated in any way. Maybe he'd broken it? He was very sorry if he had but he wasn't going to stick around to check, so he very quietly made his way over to the Slytherin table. People glared at him when he sat down. Suddenly everyone started whispering, and the whispering turned into chattering, and soon he was sure the whole hall was talking. He couldn't tell if they were talking about him because he couldn't hear a single word out of this mess.

"Quieten down now, children!" A man stood up out of his big chair, and Harry vaguely recognised him from somewhere. Was he the chocolate frog man? "We must continue with the sorting, or you will not be able to eat." The room fell silent again once more and Harry tried to watch rather than worrying. He was worrying, of course, but he could decide what to do about being in the evil dark wizard house later, when he had time and space to think about things.

Ron, the boy who he had thought could maybe possibly be his friend, didn't go to Gryffindor either. He ended up in Hufflepuff, and he seemed pretty upset, but Harry watched as he smiled once his new housemates spoke to him. None of his had spoken to HIM yet.

Once the sorting was done and a final boy sat down at the Slytherin table (just opposite him; openly staring), Dumbledore stood, said a few things too quickly for Harry to process properly (maybe they were nonsense words??), and then the food appeared.

The noise started all at once, enough that he couldn't stop his hands clapping to his ears immediately. Stupid. No one would like him if he was antisocial and refused to listen to them. They stared at him, but nothing was said. Nothing. It was like they'd already decided to ignore him for something. Something he had no idea he'd done. Was he rude to someone? He was rude to Malfoy, but he wouldn't be important, he was just a brat. He was like Dudley, but he'd only just started school, he couldn't have a gang.

It took him a while to realise he could just sort of take the food. And then he realised he didn't know what he liked. Or what would be horrible bad. Sometimes food was just bad, no matter how hungry he was, and he wasn't even that hungry now. He ate loads of sweets earlier. He took a couple of things off the few plates in front of him. A couple of pieces of bacon that were dripping in almost as much fat as Dudley had on his body. But he'd never really had meat with fat on it that didn't involve scraping tiny fragments of meat off lumps of inedible fat.

He pushed the food around his plate for a while, waiting for people to stop staring at him. Watching him when he was eating just meant they'd take it when they thought he wasn't paying enough attention. But they wouldn't stop. They just kept watching, and he had to keep looking down at his plate, hoping nothing was floating off due to a bad prank.

He managed to eat a tiny bit, though, enough to stave off the bad sick feeling inside him, the one that came from eating far too many sweets. He ate enough to almost lose it all over again when he looked next to him and there was a ghost. And honest to god silvery ghost with blood all over it. He almost lost the food because the blood made him feel...it wasn’t dripping on the floor or anything, but the wound it came out of was rather close to his face and even in shades of silver it was incredibly gory. He didn’t want to know how this man had gotten those.

And he almost lost his dinner again when he dared glance up to the table of teachers to see what they looked like. Because he looked up and suddenly a sharp pain nearly wrenched his forehead in two. He ducked his head away from the two men sitting next to each other, the one with the turban (Quirrel? He recognised the face from somewhere) and then a new man who had a big nose. He couldn’t work out which one was causing the pain, but on looking away it stopped. It didn’t stop the tears that he could feel in his eyes though, it had really hurt and he was stressed and this place, though magical, was so far friendless and without a nice small space that was private. Harry had never really found himself wishing so much he had a cupboard under the stairs that was calm and quiet and without people staring at him for something or other he must have done wrong, but they wouldn’t tell him what he’d done so he could fix it. They wouldn’t even let him go somewhere quiet to think about what had just happened.

Eventually, finally, after an agonisingly long time of sitting still in one seat not even talking to anyone, the feast was wrapped up. Harry was too wired and upset to properly listen to what had been said, but he did have to block his ears to the song. Because it was awful and horrible (and people were staring at him even more now). He got the general gist of the idea of how bad things were forbidden and the corridor he didn’t hear the name of was forbidden and there were all these other things he couldn’t do too. But he didn’t really mind. A big magical forest sounded really cool, but having been on forest walks when he was with school and occasionally with his aunt and Dudley, he knew that forests were actually dangerous, and if it was forbidden there probably weren’t any well trodden paths running by tiny streams he could be frequently pushed into and have it blamed on his own carelessness and clumsiness, and occasionally ‘losing his balance because he tried to push me, mummy’.

Once that was all over, he could finally get up and follow all the other people in his year as they clambered after a taller and rather scary looking boy who was a lot older than them. He enjoyed that bit a lot. Walking was fun and much better than sitting and looking at food he didn’t want to eat. He could look around at all the things in the castle instead, and it got especially interesting in the corridor full of portraits that stared at them and spoke about them all. It was sort of funny, even if they were talking about him, because they were paintings. Talking paintings. That was so cool he could barely even make the thoughts on how cool it was coherent.

The dungeons they were being lead to were slightly cooler and slightly darker than the areas higher up in the castle, and for that he was very glad. He hadn’t realised how flushed his face had been beforehand. But here it was nice, and there weren’t bright candles everywhere, just a couple of torches that cast the dungeons in silver light that made everything look like it was lit by moonlight. He liked it, even though it cast dark shadows that could hide anything. But maybe that was a good thing? He might be able to sit in a shadow quietly around a corner and no one would ever bother him when he didn’t want to be bothered.

“Regulari,” the scary person said as they came to a slow stop at the end of the corridor. He said it to two statues of snakes, which Harry had figured out was the Slytherin animal due to the excessive level of snake decor in this place. Then the wall folded back, the bricks moving and shifting until there was an opening that people could get through. Inside was something amazing. Harry never would have considered that there would be a whole room behind that tiny wall. The room was big and round, lit with a faint green light. As they stepped inside, the scary boy started pointing out the separate reading lamps, the chairs, the fire and the area they could just watch the lake, and then the steps to the dormitories, telling them to split up into groups for rooms. Harry ended up shoved with the two people who weren’t Malfoy and weren’t his thugs. They looked a little more pleasant than the aforementioned trio, but they alternated between staring and pointedly removing their eyes from him. He was confused. What had he done?

Last came the welcoming speech from the head of house, Professor Snape. Harry could barely listen, he was so tired, but he tried his best. It was a large amount of waffle about conflicts being private and people hating the house because of conceptions about dark wizards. Harry could feel (and see) eyes on him constantly during the speech, and he still couldn’t work out why. There was something about him, maybe it was the famous thing, that meant these people hated him. That dark wizard person, probably. He wasn’t good with names. Voldewort, quite possibly. Something like that, not that he thought it was important to remember the name, considering that the man was both dead and people seemed to consider his name some sort of taboo word that no one could say at all lest he crawl out of the grave and curse him with his dead arm or something. He doubted that was how wizards worked and stuff.

The final part of the speech that was, thankfully, not dragging too much, involved that the house head would like to speak to them all at some point during the year to check up on them and they would be summoned individually based on whether he thought he needed to talk to them or not. That sort of made Harry nervous due to the hawk nosed glare that was currently on him, and he felt like his meeting would be soon.

Then they finally finally finally got to go to bed, and he didn’t even have time to think about the problem of where he had been sorted, because he just fell asleep very quickly. Almost as soon as he got into bed, in fact. He could think about it in the morning, because at the moment this place wasn’t urgently bad.


End file.
